How To Manually Uninstall a Stubborn Service in Windows?

There are programs that are not easy to uninstall. Sometimes you can easily uninstall the said programs only to find out that they left a trail of files in C:\Program Files\ or C:\Program Files (86)\ that you then try to manually delete.

If all goes away and leaves your computer alone, great! You do not need this article. This article is for times when the program just won’t go away and reports that there is another system using it or another user currently running the program. If there is no user that you know of and there are not programs you are aware of that are still running the unwanted application:

Try to kill the process in the Applications tab of your Windows Task Manager.

If the problem persists, Check your Services tab of the Windows Task Manager and look for the name of the unwanted application or for anything related to it.

If the application you are uninstalling had a server component, you will find it in the list of Services. (Hint: Sort the list by Name instead of PID you can at least identify the program by name.)

Once you find the problematic service. Right mouse click on it to Stop the service and then try to delete the folder or application you had a hard time deleting.

If that still does not let you remove it, then go ahead and run an elevated command prompt to run sc.exe

The command sc.exe delete <service name> should help you completely remove or delete the service, where <service name> is the name of the service itself as you see it in the service management console, not of the exe.

Finally try to delete the folder you were attempting to delete from C:\Program Files\ or wherever you had installed the application.

If all none of the above solves the problem, there are certainly other methods out here. Let us know what did the trick for you by commenting below. (Pro Tip: Consider bringing in some of the big guns like the Process Explorer from Microsoft’s SysInternals Utilities).

Posted by Rafiki Technology

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